🌎 ESPAÑOL // ENGLISH
EDITORIAL: CAPTCHA, or How to Catch a Human Being (2013)
As one of the consequences of the digital revolution, access to information presents itself both as a right and as an obligation for the citizens of the Internet, who construct and redefine their roles with every click. The development of homo digitalis has brought with it a torrent of theoretical reconsiderations concerning other dimensions of human existence as shaped by online behavior: the tribes formed through social networks, the replacement of the division of labor by collective production, and the search and selection strategies revealed through personal browsing histories, to name only a few.
It might seem that an issue devoted to net art should concern itself equally with the evolution of this art form and with its points of intersection with other new media and with mass culture in general. Certainly, net art is closely tied to Internet visual culture, as evidenced by the recent proliferation of disparate phenomena and platforms: interactive tablets, Instagram, Tumblr (and its apparent replacement of the blog), the New Aesthetic, seapunk, and SOPA. More recently, the term gif was named Word of the Year by the Oxford American Dictionary, signaling the prominence of works produced for the Internet within popular culture.
Yet beyond technological change, active users emerge at the center of all these activities. In an anonymous post, a user asked the administrators of COLLECT THE WWWORLD, “What is net art?” (1) Their response referred neither to media, themes, nor techniques, but rather to the new condition of the user: “it is the art of netizens,” the community that shares the territory of the Internet. If this is understood as a recursive moment within a historical model, it is hardly surprising that online artist communities have developed their own circuit, one that remained outside the system during its rise and that throughout the last decade has been explored both through institutional critique and through a reconsideration of aesthetics itself.
Without question, for both digital and analog projects, visibility and the ability to circulate and exert influence are tied—perhaps directly—to their online presence. Yet there still appears to be a divide between the world (or market?) of contemporary art and the realm of new media, which includes net art. Nevertheless, it seems futile to focus exclusively on the debate over when and how the art world will fully embrace new media. This will undoubtedly occur over the coming decades due to the pervasive influence of the Internet across most spheres of human activity; moreover, the avant-garde has never been able to resist the culture industry for very long, nor, in fact, should it.
At present, it is far more productive to focus on the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes tense relationship between net art and the offline world, as this may lead to a deeper understanding of the medium and its persistence within culture at large. The essays included in this issue of New York Magazine of Contemporary Art and Theory address subjects related to art that lives online or is created through online means, but they also seek to remind us that net art is, after all, made and experienced by human beings. These texts explore questions of interactivity, the user as artist, authenticity, censorship, conservation and exhibition strategies, the market for online art, and projects with both online and offline dimensions, among others.
This last element was perhaps the most recurrent theme throughout the preparation of this issue—the notion that beyond the technology or code upon which a work depends, and beyond the challenges posed by its eventual obsolescence, its implications and history are neither fully realized nor entirely contained within cyberspace.
In other words, it seems that net art cannot and should not be entirely divorced from art and life offline; it may be that the most relevant and important projects require some form of connection to the non-digital world. This does not mean that net art should be replicated through analog media, nor that it must affect our “real” lives in an easily discernible way. Rather, we might consider the art world’s current inability—or unwillingness—to fully embrace net art as an opportunity. The idea that net art is fundamentally different from analog art and life may never completely disappear, but for now, the tension between these two spheres remains one of the most important points of entry into this medium.
(1) COLLECT THE WWWORLD, The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age. http://collectthewwworld.tumblr.com/